"Wireus Repairus" is in full swing. Honestly that doesn't really describe what's going on. It will be one wire at a time and the following pictures will help me put the wires back together as they once were. I hope. Above: This is off the mainline control panel. There is no Common Wire this is all based on Cab A and Cab B, DPDT toggle switches. Did I need to say that? You don't want to see what happens anytime I use common wire blocking. Not a good idea. Above: This is the cabled wire leaving the mainline control panel. It doesn't have to be pretty it just has to be. Do I dare add, And Work!! Above: These are the wires to the Coal District, coming off said control panel. A box of track hanging out in the background, under the layout. Do you see the 2 @ 2X4's that have been merged. In order to separate these two sections we had to cut them apart. That darn ballast glue really worked. The wire,you asked? Right here is where all the wires were/was/are cut, your choice on the wording to be used. Now all that wire looks like spaghetti. Above: You can see a train drifting downgrade in the Coal District. You can also see and the focus of this discussion is. The cabled wire that leads to a Junction Point or Control Bungalow, in the access hole in the middle of the helix'i or helix's...again, your choice. Yes, I've been putting it off. I'll bet you all knew that. Well, the floor is cold and my bum gets even colder while sitting on the floor. Bummer isn't it?
It's looking good Rick ! Cant wait for you to> power it all up <and dim the lights in the whole neighborhood !!!!
I'd be willing to bet spaghetti won't be on your menu anytime soon!! Keep after it, brother! Perseverance wins, even super slow and steady with an icy cold bum!
Timing is everything and I missed my chance to respond to the Spaghetti. Butter sauce and Mizeritha Cheese on top. Spell check doesn't know what to do with Mizeritha, as I spelled it. A type of goat cheese. That way I can butt heads with everyone. I like the poo-poo pillow, idea. That would heat things up and be funny besides. Yes, on the carpet but the cat's beat me to it and Christened it. Aiiyiiyii !! What the heck am I sitting in?? Your responses are To Funny but Realistic. This is the easy one to work on. I can work from the top. All of these wires have been stripped and ready to be reunited. Not the Airline but wire nutted. Aw Nuts!! It's when I have to work from underneath and working overhead. Neck craning time. Shoulders complaining if you knows what I mean. Most of these wires have been stripped and it's time to wire nut them back together. This is the part where I will spend time with a light tester and will need to move from underneath the layout to topside to move the tester from one block to another. One wire at a time. By the way, look back into the last picture. See the Telephone Cables. Those are the ones that will be fun to work with. Oh, it's not as bad as it looks. Stripping the wires will be the major problem. I'll get back to you with more as I progress. Not the Political Progressives, just progress on the layout. George you said something about dimming the lights in the neighborhood. The last go around in Big Bear Country. I shorted out the lights in my section of the trailer park. Actually, that wasn't my fault but I got blamed for it. They had to replace the wires due to water getting into the conduit and corrosion of some sort or the other. Scared the poo out of me. Later.
Rick, I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you have a box of leftover pasta, I mean wire. I'd recommend dropping a bunch of test leads from the rails to under the layout. Just be sure to put temp labels on them. If you don't have alligator clips just tack solder the lead to the top of the rail. The little extra time spent will save you lots of crawling in and out under the layout and give you more time with the high dollar strippers.
Rick, your "cabling" actually looks great. On my old layout, I was very careful to run all wires at right angles around corners and all that but on this one, it's pretty much as the crow flies. I used common rail on this one too but it's a much simpler layout than yours. I don't have any reverse loops or anything. Doug
Thanks Doug for the cabling comment. Rick's Story Time: Oh No Not Another One. I have a good friend John A. who has a point to point model railroad. He operates Cab A and Cab B utilizing Common Wire. No Wyes or Reverse Loops. The only time we had trouble is when a engine went into the dirt and the truck frame shorted out. Shorting out the whole layout. That wouldn't happen with DPDT wiring. There was some minor operational problems but his passed an "Acid Test" as we called it and I couldn't find the same problems I had with mine. So, it can be done. You just won't find me recommending it. Here's why! On one of my original HO layouts, utilizing Atlas's Slider switches. I set up Cab A and Cab B. My dad started to take a train out of the East end of the yard and up the hill on Cab A. I took one out the West end and up the hill. Going in opposite directions. We were going to meet in the middle at a small yard top side. His train took off just fine. I started mine up departing the West end and both began to stutter, hiccup, as though it was being shorted out intermittently. Dad responded, "What the...hell...did you do Rick?" Me thinking what the hell is this. The Layout from Hell. We both concluded. We tried several times with the same results. He called a friend of his who worked at a Bank in town. Harry, (not his real name) came by to check it out. He said they had tried this on a club layout in the Bay Area and it didn't work out so well. He had one DPDT electrical toggle switch in his hand. Checked out the lay of the land counting the Blocks. Said he'd be back. Disappeared out the door and was back in less then an hour. Saying he had to go to Monkey Wards to find the DPDT's. At the time Radio Shack, Montgomery Wards, and our favorite Ladd's Hardware store were all on the same block. Very conveniently located as our house and the Mortuary my dad worked for was all in the next block. So, he picked up some 12 volt automotive DPDT's. He showed me how to wire them in. Cab A on one side, Cab B on the other side and the middle out to the block. It wasn't hard. We simply broke up the Common and made it the negative side. Had to add some wire but that wasn't difficult. We built a linear temporary control panel. We must have done it right. A test run and It WORKED, very well. Harry said go get your Dad, he was in the front room watching football. With my teenage voice, yelling, "Hey Dad, you got to check this out." "Geez, he says I could of done that." You know you don't want to interrupt anyone watching football. Fortunately neither team playing... was favored. Dad came back and once again took his train out. No problems. I took my train out and I could swear he held his breath. Neither train stuttered or hiccuped. Both ran as smooth as can be. Harry, with a grin on his face said to us, "My work is done." Enjoy your train layout guys. Thanks expressed all around. Harry became a good friend. I wonder why? "Oh by the way (wait for it here it comes) you might want to widen those curves out at some point in the future," he admonished. Said with a big grin. He was right. Now that we could run trains we weren't at all happy with the way our trains looked on the curves. No Sir. I still have those DPDT's he bought that day and they will be controlling blocks on this layout. They knew how to make things that last, back then. Now then it hit us but much later. The same layout in N Scale? More later if you need it.
The one thing I discovered on this layout is, with it being eight feet long, there was voltage drop from end to the other on the common rail so I added some rather large gauge wires between the ends and that fixed it. N scale rails are pretty small. On my old layout, I had it all constructed just like in "HO Model Railroad that Grows" with two wood rails and the terminal strips mounted, etc. and it was wired for both rails being gapped. However, I never got to the building a control panel stage so the terminal strips were pretty much all wired together with jumpers. It worked OK, though. I had a couple of reverse loops in that one and I had separate toggles so I could reverse the mainline polarity (which, of course, you HAVE to have with reverse loops). I started that layout in 1975 and it also was built with honest-to-goodness L girder construction. So long ago, now. Doug
I had the same problems on my first S Scale, a friends O Scale and then my HO scale. The pro's in the business call it "Line Drop" or if they get technical "Resistance in line". Another thing they say, the smaller the wire the more the resistance or line drop. We all share that in common. Did i just say Common? Aiiyiiyii ~~!! Most smaller layouts do well with the Common. Get into heavy operations and it gets a bit more difficult.
Over the weekend I went down by the train station. To watch trains of course. Grabbed a brown bag from Burger King and enjoyed a Fast Food meal. I lucked out. A train West bound pulled into town changed crews and headed back out of town. No sooner then it's tail disappeared and a East bound pulls in. Slowing to change crews as well. Without much delay it too was heading out of town. Long trains. I think it would be an underestimation to say two miles long? This time my food ran out just as the trains disappeared. Can you beat that? Didn't take my phone or camera and yes I regret not being able to shoot pictures through a chain link fence. Darn it! I said sarcastically. The train station is more of a museum for the locals then it is a train museum. Close enough. And, I didn't leave any trash behind.
Over the weekend I discovered a series of videos put out by a retired Foreman for the Maintainer Department of the Union Pacific Railroad. If you like the San Joaquin Valley, Tehachapi Pass, Mojave and the spur lines that leave there. Your going to like this. I need to say he isn't so much a Railfan as he is interested in telling you about his former job, responsibilities, how the railroad signaling worked. Various locations he's worked. Some history. The best was a tour through the old Bakersfield Station, the former Southern Pacific Railroads Train station. Here's one of his videos. Mark Clay McGowan 7.21K subscribers Presents I think he has laryngitis.
I had a very similar thing come up when I was younger. A friend of mine was trying to wire up some KC lights to his truck. He knew wiring well enough to be dangerous... I mean seriously dangerous, but not well enough to get it right. This was a 1978 Ford F-250. He called me up asking for some help, he wanted the KC lights to turn on with the headlights, but also by themselves. He said he can get them to turn on with the heads, but when he tried to use the switch he would turn on the headlights and melt the switch too. He said he has caught one on fire, and melted 3 others. So I head to his house with a relay and a new spst switch. I wired the relay to allow current to pass for the fogs when they were turned on, but when the switch turned on the relay it would disconnect the headlights from the circuit. The relay was basically a SPDT type (common 5 pin). Funny when you only have about 1 amp going through a 10 amp switch it doesn’t melt, but 25 or so amps will! It was me adding one wire, and inserting a relay. That part of the truck never failed as long as he owned it. The rest of the truck was not so lucky.
Amperage plays a big part in all of electronics as well as household wiring. Put in the right breaker and load that circuit properly and everything works fine. Since, we've all chatted last I had a chance to get back down to the Union Pacific Railroad tracks to watch the crews at work. I understand the 2020 plan for UP includes three mile long trains. Headed out of Nampa, ID., I noticed two track gang trains headed west. One loaded with M.O.W. equipment and the other a Ribbon Rail train. Pretty sure they are lengthening all the sidings to accommodate these trains. I know that the plan over Tehachapi was to lengthen all the sidings. One example of that was Marcel and Walong sidings. Now all one siding called Marcel. Mark Clay McCowan touches on that in his videos. He kept calling it double tracking and then corrected himself by saying, "Actually it's one Main Line track with a siding". I tried but failed miserably. Too help the guys over on the Tehachapi Live Cam to understand that. They'd rather listen to a reporter for a paper out of Bakersfield. Does the press ever get anything right? Gave up trying. The word out of Cheyene or Omaho friends that work in both locations. UP wanted to run the longer trains over Tehachapi, so they day lighted some tunnels south of Tunnel 10 and lengthened out the sidings by joining the two as mentioned above. This wasn't the only area as Bealville and Caliente got the same treatment. Of course from Tehachapi to Mojave is double tracked. It wasn't the intent of Union Pacific to double track the whole hill. Traffic over it doesn't justify that. Just some thoughts as I watched Mark's Videos. Interesting, as he has the same attitude a lot of my family did. Working for A-holes and Suits who do the same things they've always done. Make decisions without asking the working man how things really work. On another note. I'm still waiting for Hidden Biden's Great Eagle to poop-out a stimulus check. I could use the money but they will most likely make me wait. Story of my life. Wait, get in line and wait some more. Then I find out I GET to wait some more. Nothing happens easily. Train layout and progress on it, are/is the same way. I need some extra parts to move ahead. I decided to take Logging Loco's suggestion. I will be ordering some 12-14 volt lights and turn them into test lights. My household test lights just barely light up. I need something easy and quick to see. Back to ordering, waiting, and you got it. That's it from me for now.
Rick, You are not alone. I waited weeks for the 1200 dollar payment I got the 600 dollar payment pretty much immediately. I haven't gotten the 1400 dollar payment, yet. Biden and crew are blaming Social Security. Doug
